It reminds me of a friend who refused the OBE because his father died in the Second World War, defending the ‘Empire’. It wasn’t belligerence, just a desire to have nothing to do with an Empire that oppressed so many and killed his father. Maybe Bob Dylan also has no desire to be honoured by what is in reality ‘the establishment’, when for so many years he’s been the anti-establishment troubadour? We’ll probably never know. Bob Dylan is an enigma, and don’t we just love him for it. A global icon who eschews the limelight! Now that is refreshing in an era of celebrity-worship.

The thing is, visionaries and seers work on another level altogether. It’s like their incredible imagination is out there roaming the cosmos, downloading universal truths into an accessible format for us mere mortals to ponder upon. George Orwell (one of the greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize for Literature) set a precedent, but despite the fact the he wrote 1984 as a warning to humanity, we seem to have interpreted it as a handbook instead. Dylan, like Orwell before him also cast pearls before swine and was largely ignored. Take his incredible words in A Hard Rain’s A’Gonna Fall as an example. The words deserve to be transcribed in full here, but this is a blog and readers’ attention can be short, so here is an abridged version, a few prescient lines that resonate with me particularly deeply at the moment:

‘I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forestsI’ve been out in the front of a dozen dead oceansI saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young childrenI heard the raw of a wave that could drown the whole worldI heard ten-thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’And the executioner’s face is always well hiddenWhere hunger is ugly, where souls are forgottenAnd I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe itAnd reflect from the mountain so all souls can see itIt’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.’

It’s sacrilege really to extract these few words from what is pure genius – so I urge you to google the whole thing, if you don’t already know it by heart. But look what he told us over fifty years ago: that the oceans are dying and that children would be made to fight wars, that sea-levels are rising but nobody’s listening to the warnings.

And he’s right. The executioner’s face is always well-hidden – I mean, do we really know who’s perpetrating climate change, that’s already responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people? And he did tell it from the mountain, and a hard rain is falling, flooding homes, cities, entire countries. And do we listen? Do we pay heed to our prophets? No.

So why should our prophets pay heed to us? In my opinion, Dylan’s keeping a dignified silence. Perhaps he is waiting for our deeds to speak louder than his words?

Something Bob Dylan has done over the years is quietly and unconditionally support the work of Artists Project Earth to raise awareness of climate change and global inequality, by collaborating on our Rhythms Del Mundo albums. A Hard Rain featured on 2010’s RDM Revival album, and the track I Shall Be Released is featured in our forthcoming album, Plastic Oceans, to be released early 2017.

Dylan is a man of many words and few words – but the words he chooses reverberate decades after they’ve been uttered. That alone makes him worthy of the Nobel Prize, whether he wants it or not.